A Review of Ilya Utekhin, Chto takoe vizualnaya antropologiya: putevoditel po klassike etnograficheskogo kino [What Is Visual Anthropology: А Guidebook on the Classics of Ethnographic Cinema]. St Petersburg: Poryadok slov, 2018, 352 pp.

Abstract

This is a review of anthropologist Ilya Utekhin’s What Is Visual Anthropology: A Guidebook on the Classic of Ethnographic Cinema. On the example of classical ethnographic films of the 20th century, the monograph considers the phenomenon of ethnographic cinema as an important part of visual anthropology. The book’s main intent is to show how outstanding projects that shaped visual anthropology as a discipline posed key questions for anthropology as a whole. These include nonverbal communication, the socialization and association of personality types with the dominant ethos of culture, the form and function of ritualized aggression in tribal society, obsession and communication with other beings, psycho-pathology, boundaries of normality, arrangement of specialized social institutes, boundaries of human beings and human projections in relations between human beings and animals. The review focuses on the key problems of developing visual anthropology as a discipline and how they were reflected in films.